About

Held each spring in Tallinn, Estonia since 2009, Tallinn Music Week (TMW) is one of the most acclaimed new music and city culture festivals and key networking events for music and creative industry professionals across Europe.

TMW’s core is an international new music festival and Creative Impact conference. The 3-day music festival presents brave new multi-genre acts from all over Europe and beyond in Tallinn’s best concert venues. The 2-day conference looks into the impact of arts as an engine for the economy while offering both inspiration and practical activities to music professionals, artists, entrepreneurs and policymakers from different areas. The festival’s side events cover art, design, public talks and various urban space activities.

TMW’s music programme is acknowledged for its bold mix of the most unique talent across Europe and beyond with all manner of genres from experimental electronica to neo-classical represented. The line-up, selected from applications by a broad-based team of Estonian and international curators is presented across Tallinn’s best venues to an audience of around 20,000 and 1,000 industry professionals from around the globe.

TMW’s strategic partner is the music industry development centre and export office Music Estonia (ME). The membership of both TMW and ME in the European talent exchange network ETEP has enabled at least two Estonian artists to perform at the acclaimed Eurosonic Noorderslag festival every year.

Some of the representatives of Estonia’s own talent pool who have managed to use TMW to ply their trade on the international scene are folk stylists Maarja Nuut, Trad.Attack! and Mari Kalkun, avant-pop act Mart Avi, shoegazers Holy Motors, metal group Talbot, indie rockers Ewert & the Two Dragons, singer-songwriter Iiris  as well as jazz and neoclassical musicians from Kadri Voorand to Kirke Karja. Among the foreign artists whom TMW has helped to pave the way to break across Europe is a new wave of Russian acts like Shortparis and Lucidvox as well as Belorussian post-punks Super Besse and Molchat Doma, Danish neo-psych band Get Your Gun and Ukrainian rap sensation alyona alyona.

Among the notable acts that have performed at the festival throughout the years are British folk legend Vashti Bunyan, Scottish composer and multi-instrumentalist C Duncan, Finnish electronic maverick Jaakko-Eino Kalevi, accordion adventurist Kimmo Pohjonen and rock legend Ismo Alanko, Swedish synth-pop group Kate Boy and the piano experimentalist Hauschka from Germany.

Throughout the festival’s eleven-year existence, the TMW conference has hosted numerous high-profile music experts and mavericks, including the legendary founder of Sire Records Seymour Stein, polymath musician Barry Adamson, influential managers Simon Napier-Bell, Marie Fredriksson, Edward Bicknell, and Peter Jenner; protest punk rock act Pussy Riot, artists-turned authors Viv Albertine (The Slits), John Robb (The Membranes), Bob Stanley (St Etienne), and acclaimed popculture scholars like Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper.

Since 2016 the TMW conference has expanded from music industry topics towards a wider social agenda, inviting speakers like the entrepreneur and philanthropist Hamdi Ulukaya, artist and activist iO Tillett Wright, gene researcher Lili Milani, MEP Julia Reda, city developer Gunvor Kronman, pioneering post-punk designer Malcolm Garrett, and many other visionnaires from different disciplines and walks of life.

TMW awards and credits

• 2014: British daily The Guardian and Sunday paper The Observer picked the top 5 music festivals in the world for winter breaks, among them Tallinn Music Week.
• 2014: Tampere Music Award for Exceptional Achievements in Music to Helen Sildna, the founder and director of Tallinn Music Week
• 2014: the “Best Host City Champion” for promoting the city of Tallinn.
• 2012: the “Best Hotel and Convention Bar” with the festival’s hotel and convention center Nordic Hotel Forum.
• 2011: the “Best Newish Event in 2011” award at The Great Escape music conference

“TMW is a festival that paves the way for future opportunities thanks to its long-standing reputation for expert curation.”
– Gigwise (UK)

Tallinn Music Week is founded and run by Shiftworks OÜ. The festival is a joint effort of around 100 individuals, companies and organizations.